What Ever Happened to Pluralism?

While having coffee with a friend recently, the subject of pluralism came up. Not one to pass up the opportunity to pontificate, I affirmed the value of pluralism while arguing that what passes for pluralism these days is mostly anything but.

Calls for “diversity” are on offer instead. Yet diversity is really nothing at all like pluralism.

Pluralism is based on differing ideas, perspectives, backgrounds, and identities, each granted free expression. Out of this cacophony of varied and sometimes contentious speech, consensus hopefully emerges.

Each perspective is valued and necessary. The assumption is that we’re all in this together, and that our objective is to work toward a shared vision. Where we differ, in other words, is how to achieve that common purpose.

“Diversity,” on the other hand, merely mimics pluralism (as the sum total of varied perspectives). In reality it is nothing of the sort. While diversity superficially recognizes varied groupings based predominantly on race, class, and gender, it rarely allows for differing thought.

The contemporary trope of “intersectionality” is a good example. At first blush, it resembles a box of assorted chocolates containing bon-bons of differing shapes, sizes, and colors. Then again, no matter which one you bite into, they all taste the same.

One need only look at today’s college campuses. The students (and faculties) may all look different, but rarely do they deviate from the prescribed groupthink. To do so is to risk social ostracization, or worse.

In the end, one approach seeks to unite while the other to divide. Can you guess which is which?

So how is it that “diversity” came to replace pluralism? Like most things, it has a history. It did not appear out of thin air.

To understand this, we need to revisit the origins of elitist opinion in the early 20^th century. As you recall, there developed an attitude among certain artists, writers, and intellectuals that disregarded the earlier foundations of American society, the very ones Tocqueville had lauded decades before.

These included church, family, and local community organizations, which together constituted what Edmund Burke famously called the “little platoons,” those essential institutions that form not only character and citizenship, but a healthy society.

This new, emerging elite class, however, was having none of it. What Tocqueville admired, they despised. It was these very institutions, and the parochial attitudes they engendered, that was preventing society from advancing. Rather than serving humanity, these institutions were harming the individual and society.

As we said, this small but increasingly influential cognoscenti hoped to tap into the latest insights from science, the newly emerging social sciences, and advanced intellectual inquiry to impose an objective, non-partisan, unbiased stratagem for human flourishing. Gone would be the days of blinkered self-governance.

Older customs and traditions needed to give way to the inevitability of progress. The barbarism and depravity of WWI left many wondering if the older Anglo-American account of Western Civilization was all it was cracked up to be. Maybe it had played itself out. Maybe it was false.

While Europe struggled mightily with these questions, American society seemed content to return to its prewar sensibilities. Our newly minted elites, however, continued to stew noisily over the inadequacy of American middle-class customs, values, beliefs, and practices.

Then the Depression hit. Suddenly, American society was taken to the woodshed yet again, this time with renewed urgency. The time-honored “American way” came under assault, a critique the new elites had been pushing for years. Many Americans, it must be said, came to agree with them. The once sturdy foundations of society were at risk of crumbling, as had the stock market.

All bets were now off. Had traditional moral, political, and social beliefs become outdated? Was traditional American society structurally capable of meeting the complex demands of these unprecedented global crises of modernity?

Prior to WWI, American society relied largely on Judeo-Christian beliefs as well as Anglo-American law and custom. Together these had shaped the nation’s two foundational documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But amidst the multiplying calamities of the 30s, a new philosophy gained force that sought to replace constitutionalism. Pragmatism, that is, questioned received legal, social, and political custom, promoting the idea of doing “what works” instead. The older order was simply incapable of anticipating much less addressing the urgent demands of an ever-shifting present.

“First principles” or “first things,” which had served as the guiding star for all moral and cultural consideration, would be replaced by updated precepts thought capable of addressing current need. Truth was no longer deemed timeless; it had become fluid, provisional, to be held up to the light of scrutiny demanded by the “now.”

And guess who got to define, interpret, and ultimately decide what this evolving truth would look like?

No longer bound by the past, wide latitude was given those in charge, the new elite, the “experts.” Experimentation and arbitrary rule became the norm.

Enter, stage left, the new (and mostly unelected) bureaucratic state made up of these newly minted experts, those, that is, of superior knowledge and foresight who alone were capable of properly deciphering the way forward.

Ultimately, what made this approach so dangerous is that it left decision-making to a small clique, or in-group, who were both above the law and beyond the will of the people. This was not a bug but a feature. No longer encumbered by old and outdated strictures, the “enlightened” were free to decide what was needed – in our best interests, of course.

In varying degrees, this reign of “the best and the brightest” pretty much lasted up until the late 1960s when the combination of urban riots, Vietnam, and the cratering of a once vibrant economy (along with massive debt) left many questioning the merits of a system based not on law but on the speculative sentiments of the chosen few.

Human judgment, in other words, unmoored from the checks and balances of custom, religion, and an ordered constitutionalism, had led us astray. Something more foundational, more ironclad, more dependable was needed. Pragmatism had failed because it had presumed human infallibility. It had built its house on shifting sands.

But because the elite class had already relegated religion, constitutionalism, and the collective wisdom of American culture as outdated and unreliable, they searched for something new.

Eventually they settled on the concept of “rights.” Not surprisingly, it was this same group of intellectual elites who got to decide for the rest of us what a human right is. Often these bore little or resemblance to those gleaned from nature, religion, and custom. which, again, had previously formed the basis of American society. But, as I say, such quaint sentiments had been eaten away years before by the acids of pragmatism and modernity.

The emphasis now shifted to the courts, and even further away from representative government. A combination of elite academicians, the courts, and a now well-established bureaucratic state were able to fashion, and enforce, various new rights, many as if out of whole cloth.

[While it’s true that the push for new rights had simmered on the back burner for at least a hundred years (i.e. the ongoing debate over “positive” and “negative” rights”), the civil rights movement brought things to the fore. In its wake, troves of human rights suddenly were discovered pertaining to all manner of groups and enthusiasms.]

Yet despite the randomness of many of these newly established rights, they have come to possess the force of law. They are not, in other words, subject to the vagaries of human opinion. And because they are absolutes, they cannot be questioned. Violating any one of them is, by definition, not simply wrong, but often immoral.

To repeat, the American electorate does not get a say in how these decisions are made, though we’re all bound by them. They function as Holy Writ – oracles thundering forth from the mountaintop, decreed by a jealous and unyielding god. Dissenters are sinners and apostates. Old-time Fundamentalists must be green with envy.

Pluralism, notable for its free exchange of ideas and perspectives, used to define our life as Americans, albeit imperfectly. Today, “diversity,” along with its kissing cousins, political correctness and cancel culture, conspire toward one thing – the sacred doctrine that only certain views are acceptable. The rest is anathema.

This is why we cannot have civil debates these days. For there is no correct view other than the “approved’ one. I mean, how do you debate the proposition that 2+2=4? As for any outlier opinion, it is by definition illegitimate, ignorant, if not evil altogether.